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How Google's Project Tango and depth sensors will disrupt apps

Amir Rubin is the co-founder at Paracosm, a development partner on Google's Project Tango, and he is currently trying to build a crowdsourced 3D map of every place on Earth.

Rubin explains to the audience at The Conference in Malmo how Paracosm helped Google put sensors on phones that are capable of capturing depth perception images that can be made into 3D maps.

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The benefit of this is that with these maps, robots and 3D-enabled apps will be to read the environment around them. "Your mobile phone does not understand physical reality," he points out, but by using machine-learning techniques and 3D processing, apps and robots will be able for the first time to understand the shape of the real world.

The most exciting thing about this, Rubin believes, is what it means for the future of content. When everyone's phone has a sensor and can read the environment we inhabit, it will fundamentally change what apps can do and how they can interact with the world.

Matthew Panzarino

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"The content of the future is fully immersive and fully interactive," he says, pointing out how it will enable more augmented and virtual reality experiences. "Dinosaurs will be chasing you through your own house -- nowhere is safe!" He envisages content and experience becoming mashed together in a way they haven't before, giving an example of how every piece of furniture in a room could be mapped to a different musical instrument and used to play music. "When you're interacting with the world, it's not a virtual interaction -- you're actually interacting with these objects that live in your space," he explains.

Google launched its Project Tango phone earlier this year, and while we don't yet know when exactly we will see 3D sensors on Google's Nexus-branded Android phones, we can be pretty sure that the apps of the future will no longer be containstrained by our screens.